Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [4]
Even at seven I understood that my mother was fighting this woman for my father, one beguiling depressive battling it out with another for the affection of a novelist. Classic stuff, been going on since the beginning of time. I had no idea why a woman who threatened my mother so completely, a woman I was sure was his mistress, had come to the East End of Long Island to stay with us. But, as always, manners were important; you wouldn’t want to offend your husband’s lover by insinuating she wasn’t welcome in your home.
At cocktail hour the night Eileen Ellsworth arrived, my mother was in a T-shirt and dungarees, as she called them, sitting with my father in the living room. Eileen came down the stairs in a silky blouse and slacks. My mother said something about getting cleaned up and a few minutes later came down the stairs in a sexy shirt and a denim skirt, little heels. Eileen then said something about realizing it was too humid for a silk shirt and a few minutes later came down once again, trying to be nonchalant, in a dress and heels and lipstick. My father simply complimented every entrance with equal weight. “Eileen, you’re absolutely right. Let’s celebrate your arrival and get dressed up. Doris, che bella!” My mother laughed and went back up and descended the stairs again and she might as well have been carrying a gun the fight was so over. She busted out her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, heels, coral lipstick, a little blue eye shadow. She had a sexy gap between her two front teeth, and she stuck out in all the right places, which seems even more impressive at five feet tall. Eileen Ellsworth and her son, Davey, went back to St. Louis a few days later. I never saw her again.
It seemed like when you made a break from the past, people wanted to be a part of it, often people from your past. After Eileen came Aunt Carol and Uncle Tom, just as we were preparing for Hurricane Belle, our first hurricane, possibly our last if we moved back to St. Louis when the year was up like we were supposed to. Our electricity was already gone. We got one TV channel out of Rhode Island and when that went out we listened to the radio for reports. Our phone went dead sometime during the morning bluster. We filled the bathtubs with water. We lit the tall green candles on the long wood dining table. A hurricane was no impediment to Mom and Dad’s socializing. They got dressed up for Hurricane Belle. My mother put on a multicolored silk, floor-length muumuu—splashy orange, purple and pink, her hair in a short, late ’70s salt-and-pepper perm, lots of jewelry. Dad put on an old top hat and tails of his father, Dagwood’s.
My uncle Tom (not our real uncle, but our father’s best friend) was dating my aunt Carol (my mother’s half sister). These two couldn’t have been a more unlikely couple. Tom was boozy, prone to break out in song at any moment or suddenly sit down and write a musical. He and my father had written a really funny election musical called GUV! and also a Watergate Christmas carol, and they did, in fact, with a few drinks under their belt, head out with a large group of drunken St. Louis Democrats in 1972, and sing it door-to-door. But one carol no one ever expected Tom to take to the streets with was Aunt Carol. Uncle Tom had been drunk for days.
It wasn’t just the alcoholics the storm was rattling; the animals were out of sorts as well. Our dog, Jubjub, ate my dad’s nine-foot